The Pair-Up Link Building Strategy

When starting a new link building campaign, you might begin with a plethora of deep pages to your site that you want to boost. This makes perfect sense. The product and service level pages on your website are ultimately the ones that will convert your visitors into paying customers. Without these pages, your website would just be a repository of information. Unless your business model runs on providing information and begging for donations like Wikipedia, you’re probably going to want to optimize these pages and make sure they are receiving as much traffic as possible.

But that doesn’t mean that you should consistently be trying to build links to these pages from outside websites. In fact, I would advise against trying to build the bulk of your links to product/service level pages. This isn’t because you wouldn’t get any value from these links. It’s because building links to product/service level pages is notoriously difficult, and they often don’t pass editorial standards on the sites that you are attempting to publish on.

Think of it this way: if you can think of a name brand publication that you want to see your website featured on, they probably won’t be running these types of links in their editorial content. And if they do, they will charge a significant amount to run these types of pages as native advertisements and nofollow the link. In fact, according to recent FTC guidelines, publications and blogs are not even allowed to run these types of links disguised as editorial content unless they want to incur significant fines.

That being said, we typically recommend building links to product/services level pages using the ‘pair up’ link building strategy.  To do this, we create a blog post on your site that directly links to one of your product/service level pages. We then use this as a linkable asset in the article in order to pass editorial muster and consistently gain publication on high level sites.  For example, if you had a product page about designer shoes, you would probably want to build out a resource guide to finding the most fashionable designer shoes that work with your style.

This resource guide would transparently link to your product page on designer shoes in some capacity. If this is done correctly, it will be able to be linked to many fashion sites where you likely want your products be featured and that give your pages high value links. While this approach may not confer quite the level of link equity that a direct product/service level link would, it will allow you much higher value publications that are within your business’s niche.

Of course, it is perfectly possible to build direct links to product/service level pages. But it likely won’t be at the volume or quality that you want to see for a comprehensive link building campaign. The ‘pair up’ link building strategy is a way to get the best value links to your product/service level pages in a way that draws attention to your brand as a source of information about what consumers want to read. You may not be trying to provide as much information as Wikipedia, but as Google works to serve its users with the best possible information on each search query, using the ‘pair up’ link building strategy is a guaranteed way to see consistent results for your product/service level pages.

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